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mystery

(Encyclopedia)mystery or mystery story, literary genre in which the cause (or causes) of a mysterious happening, often a crime, is gradually revealed by the hero or heroine; this is accomplished through a mixture o...

Aram, Eugene

(Encyclopedia)Aram, Eugene āˈrəm [key], 1704–59, English philologist, b. Yorkshire. A self-taught linguist, Aram was the first to identify the Celtic languages as related to the other languages of Europe. In 1...

Caine, Hall

(Encyclopedia)Caine, Hall (Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine), 1853–1931, English novelist. Secretary to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he lived with him from 1881 until the poet's death and wrote Recollections of Rossetti (1...

Vian, Boris

(Encyclopedia)Vian, Boris bôrēsˈ vyäN [key], 1920–59, French novelist. He patterned his literary style on that of terse American crime fiction. His best-known work is J'irai cracher sur vos tombes [I will spi...

public defender

(Encyclopedia)public defender, governmental official who represents indigent persons accused of crime. U.S. Supreme Court decisions expanding the right to counsel to pretrial proceedings and holding that a person c...

computer virus

(Encyclopedia)computer virus, rogue computer program, typically a short program designed to disperse copies of itself to other computers and disrupt those computers' normal operations. A computer virus usually atta...

Allingham, Margery

(Encyclopedia)Allingham, Margery ălˈĭng-əm [key], 1904–66, English detective-story writer, b. London. Most of her novels feature Mr. Albert Campion, a scholarly detective of noble birth, bespectacled, mild, a...

Cobb, Lee J.

(Encyclopedia)Cobb, Lee J., 1911–76, American actor, b. New York City. He first performed with the Pasadena (Calif.) Playhouse in 1929 and made his Broadway debut in Crime and Punishment (1935). Cobb created the ...

Ibycus

(Encyclopedia)Ibycus ĭbˈĭkəs [key], fl. before 500 b.c., Greek lyric poet, b. Rhegium, S Italy. The extant fragments of his work contain the earliest-known example of the triadic choral lyric. He spent some tim...

Becker, Gary Stanley

(Encyclopedia)Becker, Gary Stanley, 1930–2014, American economist. A professor at the Univ. of Chicago from 1968, he was awarded the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for extending the scope of micro...